Friday 25th
July 2008: 7.47pm. One month of summer break down,
one month to go before I move back to Ireland with Megan! I was rejected
from my PhD application today so it'll definitely be a Masters next
year, still not sure which because most of UCC is on holiday so there is
no progress. I suppose admittedly the closing date for Masters
applications isn't until the 1st August.

I was ill for one week of this month so I lost valuable writing time,
on the other hand it broke 50,000 words about a week ago which is over
150 (book) pages. Writing speed has sped right up now I'm no longer
talking in terms of science, on good days I even generate about ten
pages though usually I need to refine them for an hour or two next
morning. It may actually be mostly done by September.

I got pissed off with that NAS box, those cheap boxes are too CPU
underpowered so I sold it on eBay and just took the hit of £30. To
replace it, I bought a dumb USB enclosure but got one with two bays
(it's a Raidsonic Icy Box) with hot swap so you could theoretically just
swap between lots of hard drives containing all your stuff. I got round
to copying stuff onto the 1Tb hard drive - amazingly, everything I have
ever burned to CD and DVD throughout my entire life of downloading
amounted to just 660Gb with a further 200Gb on the Tivo and my desktop's
hard drive. The Icy Box now has about 350Gb used - it'll last years
before it's full, then I'll just slap in a second 2Tb or even 4Tb drive.
It's a very nice enclosure actually, the hot swap really adds value, but
then it should be given it cost £45.

I also upgraded the Tivo (which I originally built for Johanna about
a year ago out of spare parts off eBay). It had originally been a year
2000 1Ghz Pentium III Compaq Deskpro EN Small Form Factor which to be
honest did very well for such ancient technology, especially with an
added PCI video card and USB2 expansion card though the IcyBox USB
controller wouldn't play nice with the USB2 expansion card so we were
stuck with shitty (but useable) USB1 speeds. In particular, that Compaq
was very quiet and used very little juice, only 40W. However, I wanted
something which could play hidef 720p h264 format video so we could
watch Planet Earth in hires and surround sound, and finally
the Intel Atom based D945GCLF uber-cheap motherboard became cheaply
available in the UK at only £37. Coupled with a 2Gb RAM stick for £20
and a cheap slimline Foxconn desktop case + quiet PSU for £30, I had me
a much improved Tivo box & central server for £100 delivered. I
literally transplanted the Linux installation as-is by moving the hard
drive over - Linux just booted and worked, except much faster -
something which would have been impossible with the previous model, the
D201GLY2 which really wasn't Intel based at all (it had a SiS chipset
which doesn't play video well on Linux). I've put the old Compaq and
video card on ebay, I should get £50-60 for them so it's only £40 spent
for a significant upgrade.

I've also ordered a mini-laptop which is called an Advent 4211. In
reality, it's actually a rebadged MSI Wind PC, also with Atom processor
and with 2Gb of RAM it cost just £270 delivered. I'll probably hack a
copy of Apple Mac OS X onto it. Chances are that next year I'll be
spending an awful lot of time stuck in UCC in between lectures as we
currently can't afford to run a car, so I might as well have something
useful to keep me semi-occupied and maybe write some more stuff
hopefully for money.

So that's about that roughly. One month of St. Andrews left to go.
How interesting! Be happy!